by richardh
29. September 2009 15:58
Our online data cleansing service has been improved to include some a new name cleansing service. Our Name Breakdown service has been renamed and extended to provide valuable additional services around the processing of the name.
So, in addition to being able to analyse a full name like 'Mr John Smith OBE' and produce a name separated into Title, Forename, Middlename, Surname and Suffix - we can now also produce:
Gender: Either Male or Female (obviously) although some are a bit more obscure. Alex is 'Usually Male' but Mrs Alex Smith would be 'Female'.
Salutation: Make sure you address your customers correctly. It is 'Dear Sir Paul', and yet 'Dear Lord Mandelson'. The system handles all sorts of titles and ranks and is especially useful when the amount of data you have on a record is inconsistent. For example, you would want a letter to go out with 'Dear J' just because you only have 'J Smith' in your database - so the service will produce 'Dear Mr Smith' on this occasion.
Name Formatting: If you have all of your names in UPPER CASE then the service will inteligently tidy the names into namecase using the case rules required for 'McDonald' and 'Van de Vaart'. It will also standardise titles and suffixes.
It will even generate a suitable title when possible if you don't have one and can tell you how much of the forename was supplied - none, initial or full forename. This can be invaluable for matching against our other services such as goneaway suppression.